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The Idea in Brief

Xerox Corporation’s European arm contributed $200 million to the firm’s bottom line—at a cost of just $1 million. Real-estate giant Re/Max’s Israel franchise network charges twice what competitors do—yet sells more franchises than all its competitors combined.

What explains such achievements? These companies successfully replicate best practices. They capture existing knowledge and apply it to key processes, such as managing a branch or selling a new product. They realize on a grand scale the gains that come with applying smart processes.

But most best-practice replication attempts fail. Why? Overconfident managers start tinkering with a nearly flawless operation or combine different practices to create the “perfect” hybrid.

To get it right the second (and third, and fourth) time, copy best practices exactly—before fine-tuning them.

The Idea in Practice

Don’t expect experts or documentation to fully reveal why a practice works. Because of tacit knowledge and invisible details, these sources can’t have all the answers.

Rather, look to the ongoing activity itself. You’ll know success is attainable (you’ve got a working example), you’ll have a clear objective (replicate the process), and your replica will have coherence (because the original activity does). Use these steps to ensure successful replication:

1. Select a practice that can be copied—and that’s worth copying. Some processes, such as unusually productive interpersonal working relationships, aren’t “clone-able.” Others can be copied but perhaps shouldn’t be; e.g., when their success stemmed mostly from luck.

To select a practice for replication, ask: “Can we copy it? Should we? Does it have a track record and offer a detailed example of what we need to achieve?”

2. Work from a single, active template. You’ll have proof of success, performance measurements, concrete steps, and a reference when problems arise. Example:

As Banc One acquired new banks, it paired each new branch with a “sister bank”—a bank that had already converted to the company’s products and systems. New staff visited sister banks. It also created a “model” bank with new corporate standards and operating procedures in place. These living templates helped new branches make decisions confidently, avoid errors, and anticipate and circumvent potential problems.

3. Copy the example exactly. Resist the urge to tinker with the template early—you’ll risk re-creating problems that the practice’s originators already faced and addressed. Example:

Intel developed its “Copy Exactly!” method to transfer semiconductor manufacturing know-how to new factories. Copy Exactly! means replicating any potential contributing factor to the process—e.g., the configuration of a particular pump—in minute detail. Intel’s new factories now open with yield, quality, reliability, and efficiency comparable to the template factories—beginning on day one of production.

4. Adapt only after achieving acceptable results. The Great Harvest Bread Company makes new franchisees adhere to the “tiniest letter” of its instructions—for one year. Then they’re free to incrementally innovate on their solid platform of existing knowledge.

5. Don’t discard the original template. No copy perfectly replicates the original. Refer to your template to identify and correct mismatches.

Once a business is doing a good job performing a complex activity—managing a branch bank, say, or selling a new product—the parent organization naturally wants to replicate that initial success. Indeed, one of the main reasons for being a big company rather than a small one is to capture on a grand scale the gains that come with applying smart processes and routines.

Yet getting it right the second time is surprisingly difficult. Whole industries are trying to replicate best practices and manage organizational knowledge—but even so, the overwhelming majority of attempts to replicate excellence fail. A slew of studies has confirmed this uncomfortable fact. One found that only 12% of senior executives are happy with how their organizations share knowledge internally. Another found that companies invariably have more trouble than they anticipate transferring capabilities between units.1 Anecdotal evidence suggests that chief knowledge officers and chief information officers—the senior executives charged with exploiting knowledge assets—are also failing to get the job done. From all reports, these executives come and go extraordinarily quickly.

The reason for this dismal state of affairs? In reality, the underlying problem has more to do with attitude than it does with the inherent difficulty of the task (although the task is not easy). People approach best-practice replication with the optimism and overconfidence of a neophyte stock trader out to beat the market. They try, for example, to go one better than an operation that’s up and running nearly flawlessly. Or they try to piece together the best parts of a number of different practices, in hopes of creating the perfect hybrid. They assume, usually incorrectly, that the people running best-practice operations fully understand what makes them successful. As a result of this general overoptimism, people attempting to replicate a best practice are nowhere nearly as disciplined as they need to be.

There’s a better way to get it right the second time (and the third, and the fourth, and the fifth). It involves adjusting attitudes, first of all, and then imposing strict discipline on the process and the organization. In this article, we’ll describe in detail what goes wrong with best-practice replication, and then we’ll suggest principles to help managers harvest the knowledge developed so painstakingly in their organizations.

What Goes Wrong

Before we plunge in, we should note that we’re talking about a particular kind of knowledge transfer: the kind that happens when one group is engaged in a complex, systematized activity that produces good results and another group attempts to reproduce those results. The goal is to capture and leverage existing knowledge and not to generate new knowledge. This kind of activity is less glamorous than pure innovation—and it’s also far more common in every kind of business. In the course of researching this subject, we studied a wide range of business settings: branch banks, retail stores, real estate franchises, factories, and call centers, to name a few. Such enterprises all need to be able to reproduce successful organizational routines in new settings. In fact, we’d be hard pressed to name a medium- to large-sized business that doesn’t need to replicate its own best practices.

Managers who want to leverage knowledge in this way typically start by doing one of two things. Sometimes they go straight to an expert source—say, the person who designed and runs a best-practice call center—and pick her brain. They ask what she did at the start, why she did it, what problems have cropped up along the way, why the operation works as well as it does now, and so forth. Alternatively, managers consult documentation covering the same territory that has been put together by one or more expert sources. This information is often available on intranets. Both approaches can be used to gain a rough understanding of a particular system or to obtain insight into smaller, isolated problems. But if you use only these methods to try to gain a deep, rich understanding of the knowledge implicit in a complex organizational system, you’ll run into real problems. When it comes to complex systems, we found that no single expert fully grasps, and no set of documents fully captures, the subtle ways in which individual components are interwoven with one another.

The expert source’s ignorance—of which she’s generally unaware—can take a number of forms. Many details of the system are inevitably invisible to her. Some may be known to individual workers but not shared with higher-ups. Others may be tacit—learned on the job and well known but impossible to describe in a way that is helpful. Some may be secrets undisclosed because they make individual workers’ jobs easier or because they run counter to an organization’s formal work rules. Some represent “learning without awareness,” adjustments that people make without being aware that they’ve made them. For example, hearing fluid moving through pipes may be a cue, not consciously recognized, that a process is operating correctly. Other unacknowledged characteristics may be hidden contextual factors related to, say, the design of equipment or even prevailing weather conditions.

Documents suffer from similar shortcomings. Information can be incomplete, fragmented, distorted in subtle ways, and insufficiently attuned to the nuances and interdependencies of complex processes. In addition, when many documents are involved, the information is frequently contradictory. Individual sources contain unique perspectives that reflect differing jobs, responsibilities, and assumptions.

Placing too much trust in experts and documents is the first big mistake organizations can make when trying to replicate best practices. The second can occur when a manager actually starts to set up the new process: He turns into a cowboy. He forgets that he’s trying to replicate something and immediately starts trying to improve upon it. These “improvements” can take many forms. The manager might cherry-pick parts of a process: The folks in our Singapore plant do a terrific job controlling mask placement, for example, but the U.S. factories have radically improved stepper alignment, so why not combine these improvements to have the best of both worlds? Or maybe he tinkers with the process: He came from a doughnut franchise, perhaps, and he’s pretty sure that bagels can sell faster if customers wait for service in several lines rather than just one. Or he might try to customize the process prematurely; managers can only rarely predict correctly which aspects of retail operations will need to be adjusted in new locales—but they usually go right ahead and try anyway.

These attempts to improve the process usually turn out to be misguided. The perceived advantages may be illusory because they are based on inaccurate information or an imperfect analogy between two business settings. More typically, the advantages are real enough, but attendant disadvantages have been overlooked: The changes may compromise safety, for example, or they may create nonobvious interactions within the system. Very commonly, the effects of disadvantages spread out through various parts of the system and go unnoticed because they are small individually but significant in the aggregate.

The people who are trying to get it right the second time—like the expert sources they consult—overestimate how much they know and are overoptimistic about their chances for success. (See the sidebar “A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing” for more about this phenomenon.) In some managerial contexts, of course, overconfidence and overoptimism are great things. But in the context of best-practice replication, they’re big trouble.

A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing

Behavioral researchers studying decision making have documented a general tendency for human beings to be both overoptimistic (expecting things to turn out better than they actually do, on average) and overconfident (overestimating the quality of their own knowledge and skills). If you ask students how well they’ll do on an exam, for example, most guess that their own performance will be above average. Researchers obtain similar results when they ask about the likelihood that people will contract a disease, earn high salaries in the future, and so forth.

There is analogous evidence relating specifically to overconfidence about causal understanding. As long as things work, people tend to style themselves as experts on why they work. And when something goes wrong, they tend to seize on the first plausible contextual explanation that presents itself—even though other explanations no less reasonable than the first may exist. When people try to explain a disaster after the fact (an accident in a nuclear power plant, for example), they are typically under pressure to name a relatively simple cause so that existing policies can be revised to prevent similar events in the future.

Much of what we’ve observed seems to fall into the pattern of these research findings. People running a successful practice overestimate their understanding of it, so they unintentionally provide misinformation to managers trying to replicate the practice. When something in the process goes wrong, a diagnosis can occur too quickly and a variety of factors in play may get overlooked. And when people are trying to replicate success, they may rely too much on their own understanding of its causes and cheerfully expect that a system modified according to that understanding will deliver results that are as good as or better than the original.

For a review of overconfidence in decision making, see R. Nisbett and L. Ross, Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment (Prentice Hall, 1980). About the tendency to simplify causation, see Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (Princeton University Press, 1999), and J. S. Carroll, “Organizational Learning Activities in High-Hazard Industries: The Logics Underlying Self-Analysis,” Journal of Management Studies, 1998. Studies about optimism include F. P. McKenna, “It Won’t Happen to Me: Unrealistic Optimism or Illusion of Control?” British Journal of Psychology, 1993, and N. D. Weinstein, “Unrealistic Optimism About Future Life Events,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1980.

Recasting Best Practice

To surmount these difficulties, we propose that you do two things differently. First, don’t look to experts or documentation for a complete understanding of any complex activity. Instead, look to the ongoing activity itself. That’s not to say you shouldn’t consult experts—you should and you must. But don’t fool yourself into thinking they hold the keys to the kingdom. You’re much better off looking to a working template; it’s the only thing that will provide a coherent, comprehensive illustration of the knowledge you’re trying to leverage. Second, when you look directly at that activity, don’t assume that you’ll fully understand what makes it work any better than the experts. Adjust for your own overconfidence.

Practically speaking, these suggestions have one implication: You should copy the template as closely as you can. In reality, perfect replication can never be expected, but closely copying a template gives you three advantages. First, you know it’s possible to succeed, because there’s a successful example in front of you. Second, you have a clear objective: to create a replica. Importantly, that replica includes performance measures that will tell you if you’ve succeeded. Third, you have a built-in tactical approach: Copy the working example in detail. This means not merely duplicating the physical characteristics of plant and equipment but also duplicating the skill sets of employees and the practices they follow. Reliance on a template offers the huge advantage of built-in coherence; the replica will be coherent because the template itself already is. This approach allows you to copy quite complex organizations: Close copying of pieces that fit together will produce pieces—and ultimately subsystems—that can be fit together with minimal troubleshooting.

Banc One (now Bank One) is a good example of the approach we recommend. During the 1980s and early 1990s, the bank became extraordinarily good at converting acquired banks and their branches over to its own systems. (Indeed, it was this capability that drove its unprecedented success in this period.) To operate within the Banc One family, branches and back offices needed common operating procedures. One tool the bank used to disseminate operating knowledge was traditional documentation, such as procedural guidelines and flowcharts that gave certain employees instructions for handling commercial loans, installment loans, money orders, and food stamps. Similarly, it provided other employees with instructions about how to open new savings accounts, make loans, and sell stocks and treasury notes. These codified procedures supported and complemented the in-depth training given to personnel in the acquired banks and remained in place until the staff could comfortably operate the new systems on their own. Trainers were experienced in the actual use of the systems in other bank branches. Thus, Banc One extensively used both people and documents to transfer knowledge.

But it did much more. It also selected a sister bank to provide staff in the new bank or branch with a model for the postconversion operating environment. Typically, a sister bank had recently converted to a similar set of products and systems and served similar types of customers. The new staff could visit the sister bank to see how it operated. Having a living template helped the new bank make conversion-related decisions with more confidence. There were still plenty of judgment calls about how to realign operating units, for example, despite the many operating procedures provided. A sister bank that had already made these calls could point the acquired bank’s managers in the right direction. The sister bank relationship also reduced the likelihood that the new bank would repeat avoidable errors. If the sister bank’s employees had resisted the shift from in-house to centralized processing, for example, the acquired bank’s managers could use that information to anticipate the problem and circumvent it through superior internal communication.

In addition, Banc One developed a different sort of template in the form of a “model” bank located close to its headquarters. The model was a functioning laboratory that replicated a retail bank’s front and back offices, with all the latest corporate standards, operating procedures, and work flows implemented just as in the branches and sister banks. Every new system was incorporated into the model bank. The model bank complemented the sister banks before, during, and after conversions occurred.

Close copying isn’t simply the best way to reproduce good results. It can also create a competitive advantage. For example, franchises, more than any other type of business, pretend to be very good at exact replication of successful models. Not all of them actually are, but the ones that do deliver on that promise generally gain a competitive edge. As the CEO of Re/Max Israel’s real estate franchise network reflects: “Our competitors charge half what we do, and we sell more franchises than all our competitors put together. I attribute a good part of our success to the fact that I was wise enough to understand that I was purchasing a lot of wisdom.” When the CEO first opened franchise offices in Israel, he didn’t fully comprehend the reason for many of Re/Max’s processes—but he followed them to the letter nonetheless, figuring that as he learned the business, their purpose would become clearer.

Copying Starbucks

As he tells the story in his autobiography,1 Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz founded Il Giornale, the store that eventually morphed into Starbucks, because he wanted to recreate the Italian espresso-bar experience. Schultz was paranoid about any detail that would undermine the authenticity of the experience. Only Italian opera could play over the loudspeakers. The servers had to wear bow ties. There were no chairs—just a stand-up bar. Schultz vowed that he would never offer nonfat milk; the mere mention of it was tantamount to treason. Menus were sprinkled with Italian words. The decor was as Italian as he could make it. In short, Schultz transplanted all the details he deemed essential to the Italian coffee-bar experience.

He and his colleagues gradually realized that many of the coffee bar details didn’t work well in Seattle. Customers complained about the opera. Employees complained about the bow ties. People wanted chairs so that they could sit and read newspapers. So the entrepreneurs started to adapt the store to their customers’ needs. They fixed some things easily—they added chairs and changed the music. Nonfat milk even found its way onto the menu. But Schultz was careful, even early on, not to make too many compromises or changes. Gradually, a U.S. version of the Italian-style coffee bar emerged. It was substantially different from the original store, but it retained some Italian flair and developed a unique flavor all its own.

Now Starbucks is expanding internationally. As an exercise in knowledge transfer, we ask our students: How would you advise Schultz to proceed with the expansion? We get them to list everything they can remember about Starbucks stores and fill several pages on a flip chart with their responses. Then we ask, Which details are fundamental to the concept of Starbucks? Which can be safely adjusted? We don’t know the answers to these questions; probably Schultz doesn’t, either. But he’d do well to remember his own early approach—copy exactly. When McDonald’s first attempted to adapt itself to foreign markets, the results were disastrous. The company concluded that it would be easier to change a country than to change the McDonald’s system. So it faithfully copied all the processes and then just made small modifications to the menus.

Our students, like many managers, start out thinking they know exactly what’s essential and what isn’t. Eventually, they recognize the truth: They can never know for sure precisely what makes a Starbucks a Starbucks.

1. Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang, Pour Your Heart into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time (Hyperion, 1997).

Guidelines for Success

Defining the activity itself as the authoritative source of knowledge, and then copying it closely, works best if several guidelines are followed.

Make sure you’ve got something that can be copied and that’s worth copying.

Some processes work for idiosyncratic reasons and cannot be copied. The most common of these: a great manager or a group that’s worked together well for years. Obviously, the person or group can’t be broken down into component parts and cloned, so it’s always worth asking, Is this something we can copy? We should note, however, that successful people often believe that their unique gifts are what make something work; a close observer might come to a different conclusion.

Some processes can be copied but maybe shouldn’t be. Think about whether an activity or process might have a better reputation than it deserves. Perhaps it has a charismatic champion, or perhaps the group performing the activity delivered great results one year due mostly to luck. Before an activity is held up as an exemplar, someone with a clear head needs to answer a few basic questions: Does this activity have a track record? Is it really important enough to copy? Is it a detailed example of what we’re trying to achieve? If we merely replicate its results, will that be good enough for us?

Work from a single, active template.

Having a living template is important for a number of reasons already noted: It provides managers with proof that success is possible, performance measurements that define success, a tactical approach to achieve success, and something to refer back to when the copy falls short. Having a single template matters just as much. Indeed, there’s really no such thing as a best-of-the-best template.

Rank Xerox, previously the European arm of Xerox Corporation, learned the importance of having a single, active template several years ago. In 1994, Rank Xerox selected nine best sales practices. It designated “benchmark country business units,” country operations that provided working examples and served as concrete illustrations. If you wanted to know how to sell DocuTech color copiers, for example, you went to Switzerland and learned. If you wanted to know how to retain major accounts, you went to Spain or Portugal. Taken as a whole, this initiative—referred to as Wave I—was a resounding success. It contributed $200 million in incremental revenue to the bottom line of this $4 billion company and achieved 133% of the established goal, at the nominal cost of $1 million.

Based on this extraordinary performance, Rank Xerox launched an even more ambitious initiative—known as Wave II—to leverage a computer-assisted sales management process. In this case, the two units that could have served as templates were located in countries from which best practices were not easily accepted. To work around potential skepticism, the practices were presented as if they had resulted from a combination of modules, taken from different countries, that added up to the desired activity. The hope was that this best-of-the-best approach would forestall political opposition. It did, but at a high cost. Country units did pay attention, but they had no working example that demonstrated feasibility or provided guidance. They had a poorly defined sense of what was expected and how to proceed. The absence of a template was fatal to Wave II; implementation efforts were universally abandoned before they had seriously begun.

Copy as closely as you can.

Eventually, many complex activities that are copied need to be adapted. If you anticipate some of these changes, why not adapt immediately? The short answer is that the wisdom embedded in complex practices—that is, the complexity of the many problems already faced and addressed by those who developed the template—may not be apparent right away. Thus, it makes sense to demonstrate that you can obtain decent results before you introduce changes.

Intel, working with that philosophy, developed its “Copy Exactly!” method to transfer semiconductor manufacturing know-how from the first factory that produces a particular device to subsequent ones.2 This method was introduced because the company hoped that the effectiveness of its knowledge transfer could be improved by an order of magnitude. It replaced the then prevailing approach called “Process Output Matching,” which had allowed engineers to selectively copy what they thought would be useful and simultaneously to introduce changes, like incorporating the latest-model equipment, for example.

Simply put, the Copy Exactly! philosophy means that any potential contributing factor to the process, in all its specificity, must be copied in minute detail, unless it’s not physically possible to do so or unless the competitive benefits of introducing a change override the imperative for precise replication. For example, a request to use a differently configured pump, which also produces the desired pressure, is met with a stern reply that it’s crucial to use the same components and that changes are not allowed. Occasional adaptations do occur, to be sure—but there’s a strong bias against adaptation, and they occur far less frequently than they did in the days of Process Output Matching.

Implementing Copy Exactly! is a complex, multilevel process. First, physical inputs to production must be shown to have been correctly copied; next, process outcomes are matched; and finally, the product itself is proven to be up to standard. Tests at each level must be passed before moving on to the next level. If a test fails, the root cause must be found and eliminated before moving to the next step. If the root cause can’t be located, troubleshooting occurs to determine which of the previous inputs is responsible. Managers must resist the temptation to solve problems by making adjustments not found in the template. Yielding to such temptation usually creates more difficult problems down the road. Exact replication facilitates rapid diagnosis and problem solving because employees have previously attended so carefully to the detailed implementation of individual activities or components.

The importance of preserving each element in its given form increases when there is uncertainty about how a departure from the original form will affect performance. When skills are complex, a small departure from an established way of doing things may have dire consequences. Such departures are typically mistakes, often already encountered by the original developers, that may yield valuable lessons but are not worth repeating. Occasionally, a small departure can be devastating.

The Copy Exactly! policy has been a resounding success and has brought about dramatic improvements in transfer effectiveness. Intel is now able to open new factories with yield, quality, reliability, and efficiency comparable to those of the template—beginning on the first day of production. In the past, each new facility had to repeat much of the same learning curve independently and usually took several months to catch up.

Adapt only after you achieve acceptable results.

At Intel, once a new product meets acceptable performance standards, the production line engineers earn the right to make improvements. At Rank Xerox, as the UK director explained in 1997, “We now only allow a business to adapt a model process if and when it has raised its performance to the same level of the benchmark unit.” Reflecting the thinking of a company whose main business is seen as the management of documents, he continued, “We lost a lot of best practices because people edited them before implementing them.” Similarly, the Great Harvest Bread Company explains to new franchisees that there are no acceptable reasons for diverging from the operating manual—and makes them agree to adhere to the “tiniest letter” of its instructions—for a year. Then, they’ve earned their freedom. A lot of adaptation and incremental innovation can be built on a platform of existing knowledge; the key is to be sure the platform is solid.

Keep the template in mind even after you create the replica.

There’s no such thing as a perfect copy of a complex organizational activity. Communication gaps between the original process and its replica are almost guaranteed to occur, so being able to refer to the template will serve you well when problems arise. The quality of a specific performance also depends on the nature and quality of the people involved. Demographic and cultural differences often challenge the effort to achieve a close match. Finally, you may miss some aspects of the template activity altogether, at least at first.

Other changes are deliberate and necessary. For example, it’s nearly impossible to take a complicated process across country borders without making some changes, and companies that try set themselves up to fail. Wal-Mart’s decision to enter Argentina with the same basic U.S. store model, disregarding local idiosyncrasies (a decision since reversed), is a dramatic example of such a situation. The new enterprise didn’t stock the kinds of meat Argentineans eat, the kinds of cosmetics they like to wear, or even appliances wired with the 220-volt power that’s standard in Argentina. Slavish copying of the home-market model probably won’t work across borders.

Since imperfections in attempted copying are inevitable and judgment calls about what to copy may at times be inescapable, there’s a fair possibility that the replica will not work well—or perhaps at all—on the first try. That’s why it’s important to have the working example to return to. The template can be used to identify existing problems and to debug the replica. Thus, at least for part of the knowledge leveraging process, there is a time when the working example is needed as a reference, before it can be dispensed with.

A note of caution. When an attempt to leverage knowledge that appeared to be going well fails, it’s usually because the working template is no longer being referred to, or adaptations were introduced too early, or both. When something goes wrong—as it often does—you need to be able to retrace your steps and figure out what happened. “Look for discrepancies” is the guiding principle for problem solving. If you can’t identify discrepancies—either because the template is no longer available or because you’ve introduced adaptations promiscuously—then you’ll have to make larger efforts to solve the problem. Other potential causes for failure may reside within your organizational climate; some of these are highlighted in the sidebar “Barriers to Success.”

Barriers to Success

An organization can employ people or create a climate that facilitates best-practice replication—or that does the reverse. Typical barriers include the following.

Uncooperative sources

If the people responsible for an existing best practice don’t want to help others, it’s unlikely that their success will be repeated.

Strained personal relationships

If the manager attempting to replicate the practice has a difficult relationship with expert sources, successful transfer is unlikely to occur.

Internal competition

If an organization actively discourages cooperation by pitting units against one another, no one has an incentive to copy or to be copied from.

Overemphasis on innovation

If an organization idealizes innovation and scoffs at copying, replication won’t happen.

Cranky copiers

If the managers charged with replicating a best practice are temperamentally unsuited to absorbing new knowledge, afraid to change, or excessively focused on preserving their own status, they’ll probably fail.

If several of these barriers exist, a person who’s supposed to copy a best practice is practically pushed into being a cowboy and trying to improve on the template. Of course he’ll make it up as he goes along—the organization’s making it too hard to act any other way.

Far more often than they realize, managers have to decide whether they want to leverage existing knowledge or create new knowledge. If they choose to leverage knowledge, exact replication is the way to go; there is limited leeway for modification. If they choose to innovate, they modify, they adapt—maybe they even invent a whole process. It is impossible to do both simultaneously to the extent that most people seem to imagine, particularly in the context of a single project.

Leveraging knowledge means using what others have already learned, with effort and sometimes with pain, through experience and mistakes. When managers leverage knowledge, they stand on the shoulders of giants. The poor track record of knowledge reuse—and the importance that replication plays in most companies’ bottom lines—suggests that effective copying is not a trivial achievement but rather a challenging, admirable accomplishment. In suggesting that managers approach institutional knowledge with humility and respect, we’re hoping that they acknowledge the careful creation done by their predecessors and that they be realistic about their own efforts. Indeed, managing to get up on the shoulders of giants appears to be an achievement all by itself.

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